I have been having problems with Firefox being sluggish so I resorted to a Lifehacker tip to see if that helped. It was a matter of opening up the Error Console from the Tols menu and entering the following long line into the command bar and hitting the evaluate button:
Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL(“VACUUM”);
It did the track once or twice but its database hoovering claims are on trial as far as I am concerned. Keeping an eye on what’s eating system resources will be on the menu too, especially after seeing what my brief foray with Ubuntu One was doing. A move to Google Chrome cannot be ruled out of the question either.